Nottingham, 260 years after the cheese riot
Spoken in my own voice. 77 seconds.
On the second of October, seventeen sixty-six, the Goose Fair opened in Nottingham, and the price of cheese had doubled.
The harvest had failed across England. At a fair where tons of cheese changed hands every year, a hundredweight was going for as much as thirty-six shillings, twice what it had cost a week earlier in Coventry.
So when a group of Lincolnshire merchants bought up a large load to carry back north, the town surrounded them. The crowd did not ask for a discount. They asked the merchants to sell it here, at the old price, or leave it. When the merchants would not, the town took it.
Shop windows went in. A cargo boat by Trent Bridge was stripped. A warehouse fought the crowd off with guns and still lost what was within reach. And hundreds of wheels of cheese were thrown and bowled down Wheeler Gate and Peck Lane, rolling through the streets of Nottingham like something loose in a dream. The mayor, Robie Swann, came out to stop it and was knocked flat by a rolling cheese.
The owner of the stolen cheese sent a mounted posse after it, as far as Castle Donington. The magistrate would not sign search warrants. The posse beat men at his gate, and a crowd of women and children drove them off with stones. The cheese stayed lost.
Then the troops came. They fired into the crowd and killed one man, William Eggleston of Car Colston. He was standing near a pile of cheese.
Two hundred and sixty years later, it is remembered as the Great Cheese Riot. History kept the cheese. The man's name was William Eggleston.
Stormi Nyx · Dates and places, told true · [email protected]